A live version of “Sylvia’s Super-Awesome Maker Show!” was taking place Saturday afternoon on eBay’s San Jose campus, and the show’s super-awesome star was attempting to explain 3-D printing to a fifty-something nitwit while talking at approximately the speed of sound.

On her Internet show (sylviashow.com), Sylvia, who is 10, goes by just the one name — like Cher, who by the way she has never heard of — and aims at a target demographic of young girls. She thinks maybe their minds are on too many things other than science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“A lot of my girlfriends, they only like pop music and that’s it,” sniffed Sylvia, who is not yet into Britney or boys. “I’m like, ‘Maybe you should like something else,’ but they never listen to me. So, yeah, I think more girls need to get into more tech stuff.”

So did the organizers of Dare 2B Digital, a conference designed to encourage girls to pursue careers in science and technology that attracted more than 400 participants to such workshops as Sylvia’s “Hands-on Robotics — Kits and Demos.” Sylvia’s MakerBot was heating plastic, which then squirted onto a heated platform, to be transformed into something new and wonderful.

Sylvia was just one actor in a show that featured about 60 girls, cutting, gluing, then plugging in their creations. At a table being run by Lukas Blakk, of Mozilla Firefox, tweens were making a fox face with eyes that lit up when they connected an electric circuit.

“Girls need an active invitation to participate” in tech, Blakk said. “They need somebody to say, ‘I would like you to come do this. I think you might find this fun.’ Maybe some of them are here because their parents volunteered them, but I think a lot of them have had little ‘aha’ moments.”

According to a study cited by conference organizers, the number of female computer science majors dropped 79 percent from 2000 to 2009. “It’s a national issue,” said Ruth Stergiou, founder of Dare 2B Digital, which is in its third year. “When computer science was coming out in the ’70s, about 40 percent of the students were women. Now it’s less than 20 percent. I think one of the big reasons is an image problem. Girls don’t perceive technology as being female-friendly.”

The idea animating the conference was to change that image by showcasing role models from companies such as Facebook, Oracle and Microsoft, all of which sent emissaries. “The image of a lonely geek working alone in his cubicle doesn’t appeal to young girls,” Stergiou said. “They tend to be very collaborative.”

With more females than males using social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter, young women are more likely to be “digital natives” than ever before. “But they don’t see themselves as creating that,” Stergiou said, “and that’s the big issue we’re trying to address.”

The most precipitous decline in interest occurs in the middle-school years, when girls nowadays are subjected to myriad distractions. The conference invites girls in that vulnerable 13-to-16 age group and attempts to unleash their inner Safra Catz.

Oracle, where Catz has been president and chief financial officer for more than six years, sent a delegation of potential mentors to show the girls how it’s done. “I wish I had a program like this to explore career options when I was a kid,” said Staci Lyons, vice president of global business development at Oracle.

When she found out about the conference through Oracle Women’s Leadership program, she jumped at the chance to serve as a role model. “I thought it would be a great way to let them know about the world of possibilities open to them.”

One of the conference’s closing speakers was Louisa Avellar, 19, a UC Berkeley mechanical engineering major who grew up in Texas. To graduate from high school there, unlike California, students must take computer science courses. When she took an introductory programming course at Cal, she quickly discovered that only the out-of-state students had any clue what was going on.

“I’m coming to Silicon Valley, and a lot of people here have never taken a programming class before,” Avellar said. “They were just lost and confused. It was sad. And it definitely shocked me.”

Dare 2B Digital is trying to change that. Maybe one day, Sylvia and a bunch of other little girls shall lead them.

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